


White Noise

by orphan_account



Series: After Crucible [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 07:38:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/783491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post breath ending. </p><p>Shepard wakes up on Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Noise

She was a child dressed in oily gray, though that morning she had donned white. She was a teenager who dreamed of a rose-coloured forever while a warm tongue swirled over her pert pink nipples and fingers slipped beneath her panties. She was a baby who cried more than she smiled; a toddler who listened more than she spoke; a youth who had it inside of her to forgive anyone, even the batarian pirate who swooped down on her father in battle, crippling him through to the core of his mind. 

She was all of those things and none of those things. It all depended on the caprices of her synapses, on the extent with which the medicines occupied her blood, on whose voices hung thick at the edge of her mind like fog, like smoke.

Sometimes, her subconscious summoned forth two soldiers. One was young and female, and the other was young and male and was dying so slowly that the female kept thinking _maybe I should kill him, maybe I should put him out of his misery, maybe I should kill him_ , but he had wanted to live and he begged her to stay by his side, hold his hand, and please, please, please not to let him die. 

She wasn't a field medic though and neither was he. All they had between them were their guns and their armour and the rocks and filthy pools of blood beneath them, and none of that was very good for stemming the flow of life from a man who'd been flayed to ribbons by a thresher maw's teeth.

By the time rescue came there was one soldier left, young and female, and she was dying so slowly inside that she barely felt it at all.

Was that her? 

No, there was a bed beneath her and a turian atop her, and that turian was snagging his claws on her skin as he ran his talons all over her body in exploratory hunger. Around them, the air was heating up in a slow burn and all she wished was that he would channel some of the roughness he used to bleach black into white and cut into her, just a little, just enough to draw blood.

As his tongue soothed the red lines that striped her skin there was no blood for him to lap up, only sweat, so she took his head and moved it lower, lower, lower, _there, yes there, don't stop_.

But he had stopped, so that must not have been her either.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

When she woke the first time, the air was so thick that the only reasonable conclusion Shepard could draw was that the entire universe was reducing itself to ash and that soon a new synthesis would be upon them; one without organics-and-synthetics-cum-hybrids; one where everyone was equal because nobody was more than a billion pieces of their whole.

It was too late for her, she thought. The ash had already invaded her nostrils, her mouth, her throat, her lungs, and she could feel it drying her body out, tightening it shut. Two years ago she had suffocated to death in the atmosphere above Alchera and now she was feeling her head swell with the same warm pressure. She was grateful for that. At least she knew what to expect.

Shortly after pain put her to sleep she thought she felt someone jostling her a little, but it might have been the floor falling out from beneath her, too.

Falling, falling, falling.

She hoped that whoever picked up her pieces and put her back together this time was less of a megalomaniac than the last man.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The people in her room weren't strangers, but she wished they were because they weren't familiar to her in quite the right way. They were doctors, each of them, and she knew them best as the voices she heard while she was trying to slip deeper into her mind. They introduced themselves to her again after she woke up for them, each one encapsuling her fingers in the palms of their hands and giving them a gentle squeeze before thanking her, moving away, and smiling while the procession continued.

None of them stood out any more than the others; they all had white coats with their names embroidered on the breast; they all wore omni-tools on their right arms; they all had their access cards clipped to to their pockets, right above the curve of their hips; they all congregated off to the side, where the monitors were; they all were human, each of them with something different about her to save. 

She hated their whiteness, and the whiteness of the room, and the blackness that watched her outside the too-large windows along the too-long wall. She couldn't understand why the chair next to her bed was so close yet so empty and she wondered who had left a vase of wilting roses beside her bed and where they had gone. She tried to trace the passage of time through the bend of their stems, the mottling of their petals, and the degree to which they had dried up and curled in on themselves, but she had no frame of reference for measuring the days through the decay of flowers. The more she thought about it, the deeper anguished settled inside of her until she could feel it churning in the marrow of her bones. 

It was hard for her to breathe but she cared less about that than her inability to speak. Shepard was terrified, confused, lost. Snapshots of Akuze flashed through her mind until her vision was drenched red with blood and her ears were ringing, ringing, ringing with a cacophony of screaming. Only this time, the images were different. Blue asari limbs scattered across asphalt. A dismembered turian cowl swaying from a lamppost as an army of brutes beat a death march against the pavement. Kaidan's smile warped into a grimace; Tali's mask shattered, terror clear on her face as infection ate away at her, little by little; James and Javik on Dragons' Teeth; EDI convulsing on the ground, sending electric currents running through a miles-wide network of small puddles, bringing countless soldiers and civilians down with her. 

Blood. 

Everywhere, blood. 

One of the doctors knelt down beside her bed, hit her cheek, called out _Shepard, Shepard, Shepard_ in a rising gradient of loudness, until he realized she wasn't going to respond; lost, as she was, to the demons eating her inside-out. 

She didn't feel the pinprick of a needle sliding into her vein but she did feel the sedatives roll over her in dull, painless pulses until she felt nothing at all anymore.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

There was a man beside her bed, and he was pretending to be Admiral Hackett. The landscape of his face was an excellent recreation of the original; his cheekbones were just high enough, his nose had that shallow valley between the round bridge and rounder tip, his jaw was thin, his chin was wide, his scar beautifully realistic. There was something like a smile on his lips though. Unfiltered hope bled through his stern, stern eyes. And he seemed unnaturally whole; the Hackett who kept coming up in her shambled mind was more hologram than human, all decked out in pure blues and golds.

“Shepard,” he said. His voice was clear. Clean. There was no static. 

_It's hard to trust things that are clean_ , she thought. Clean shots, clean runs, clean victories, clean smells, clean voices. Within them existed an underlying current of preparedness that belied their ease, a series of 'what ifs' that stained otherwise pristine successes with the fear of traps, ambushes, diversions; shit like that. Clean things could lend credence to her enemies' ability to subterfuge, and then to fight, and then to survive, and then to kill everything and everybody important to her. And then to kill her. 

She closed her eyes and the whiteness still burned through her lids with the force of a dying star. Everything around her was clean, clean, clean and she wished she was … 

… where?

Anywhere. 

Instead she was nowhere and she wondered how the cleanness overcame the nothingness.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

_Shepard._

_Shepard._

_Shepard Shepard Shepard Shepard Shepard_.

What did he want? She couldn't figure it out. Hadn't she already travelled through the Conduit, stumbled through a knee-high field of corpses, been made to shoot one man, made another shoot himself? Hadn't she opened the arms of the Citadel so they could fix the Conduit into place, hadn't she taken her gun and blown the shit out of whatever it was she was supposed to blow up to destroy the Reaper forces?

How many times could one woman be asked to die anyway. And why the hell hadn't she reached that limit yet. 

“Shepard.”

“What now?” she asked, her voice raw and grainy. 

“You did it,” said Hackett, pride flooding the gruffness of his voice. Her eyes widened and Hackett must have found realization in them because he continued with: “We're still months, if not years, away from confirming the destruction of every Reaper ship but we're optimistic that the threat has been eradicated.”

She hurt.

Reality slipped between the cracks of her mind like blood between her fingers, pooling at the pit of her gut. A part of her scrambled to collect as much of it as she could; to keep the bed and the room and the dead flowers and the man who might not be Hackett but probably was within her grasp, but it was hard. Dizzying. And the more she touched the more she felt everything blur back together into another amalgamation of old memories and present sensations. 

Something inside of her urged her to sit up. She tried. She couldn't. 

What she could manage was to lean over the side of the bed. She stared at her marbled face in the reflection of Hackett's shoes until he scrambled away from her like she was on fire, like she was liable to explode, like she was spewing acid.

Technically, it was bile. 

A doctor flowed out of the room in a flush of white to come back with a pair of nurses moments later. One of them took care of the floor; the other, Shepard. She barely registered either of them, though she went through the motions of their care. Turn this way. Lift your head. Open your mouth. Drink. Swallow. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

She breathed. 

When they left the room the doctors went with them, so only Shepard and Hackett remained. Life felt like it was flowing back into her to replace what she'd just lost and she pulled herself up so that she was finally sitting in the bed and not sprawling across it. Hackett followed suit, returning to the chair beside her, passing a cursory inspection of the floor before he decided where to rest his feet. 

“I would have though your aim was better than that, Shepard.”

She wasn't in the mood for banter. “Tell me,” she said then paused to take a breath, to give her throat a little more time to recover. “The Normandy. My crew.” 

“The ground units are fine, they send their support.”

“Why aren't they here?” asked Shepard.

“Your presence here is confidential, there's too much interest in you and the hospital can't afford the attention.” 

“So,” she said, and though she meant to connect the dots herself, her mind was still too caught up in the wanderlust of dizziness that all it drew were winding, swirling paths down which there was little solid logic. 

“We were only able to inform them of your survival,” Hackett said. 

“You said ground units. What about....”

“I'm sorry, Shepard, but the Normandy is MIA.”

Shepard met Hackett's eyes. There was sadness there and something that resembled failure; she was surprised to see both. Something fluttered featherlight in her heart. Sympathy. Compassion. Then, grief. Too much grief. So much grief that it surpassed her ability to pull herself together, to find something solid to say, to be Commander Shepard and take action against the army of emotions that was laying siege on her basic ability to exist in a moment where the Normandy did not. 

“Shepard, are you all right, is there anything you need?”

She looked past Hackett to where the roses sat dying. _My crew_ , she thought. _My ship, my body to work so I can go out there and find my people_. All things she desperately wanted to say. All things that went unspoken, crushed on the tip of her tongue by the weight of their impossibility. 

“Do you have any information?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

“Only that the Normandy completed a jump before we lost its trail.”

“So they're not in the Sol system.”

“No, they're not.”

There, in the clean white room, with injuries that shackled her to the bed, with a whole Hackett and his imperfect news, Shepard shook her head again, and again, and again but the bad thoughts remained adhered to the forefront of her mind. 

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” No matter how many times she tried to centre herself around that word it kept swirling around her like the undertow of a whirlpool, dragging her down and down and down until she felt like she was drowning. There were tears in her eyes and mucous in her nose, in her throat, and Hackett was beside her and he was rubbing her back with a softness she barely felt. 

She thought she heard him saying _it's okay, it's okay_ but it wasn't him. It was her and she was saying, “Not okay, not okay,” because, she thought, who was she to survive if they hadn't.


End file.
